Got to say, it’s a little sad that the World of Warcraft community is so incredibly starved for new content that a pre-expansion patch is being received with such enthusiasm that you might think it was the day of the actual expansion’s launch.

In any case, count me in with the crowd leaping about in joy for having something — anything — new to do. It’s going to be a little scary to see what happens to my characters, but since they’re all relatively new to me, I’m not going to cry too much to see these changes. My plan with them is to check out one per day for a few days, experiment with their builds and rotations, and solidify my Legion forerunner (right now my DK is in the lead).

Transmog 2.0 should make for a fun for-now activity to tide us over until the expansion events and Legion arrives. I kind of like how they’re rolling all of this out — gives us some time to get used to the class changes before tossing us into the new content.

I’ll be sad to see money from my garrison missions go. I’m wondering if a lesser version of that might be using garrison resources from mission rewards to trade in for sacks of gold at the trader. Every little bit counts, and the price of a WoW token just came down 2,000 on my server.

I’ve been working hard at getting my four characters’ professions set. I made some drastic changes last week, mainly dumping engineering from all but my hunter and replacing that with herbalism. Engineering is fun and all, but I want money more and I don’t want to do it on more than one character.

For my second-tier characters — shaman and warlock — I’ll simply log in every day to keep mining and herbaling in the garrison to gradually raise those up to 700, since I probably won’t be playing them for a while anyway. I spent a couple of nights last week taking my death knight on an herbalism tour of several zones, getting her within striking distance of 700. Should be there by the end of August, at least.

5 thoughts on “Happy World of Warcraft pre-expansion patch day”

It’s a bit of a bittersweet moment for me. On the one hand, good frickin’ riddance to Warlords of Draenor. What a horrid mess of an expansion.

On the other hand the radical class changes can be a source of some sadness/anxiety. My favourite spec in the game is being removed and replaced with something completely unrelated, and I’m fairly nervous about the big changes to brewmasters, too. They have been the only spec or build in any game that I actually enjoyed tanking with; will that still be true after the changes?

That said, I’m cautiously optimistic about the rogue changes. Light knows we were overdue for a facelift, and a sword/pistol hybrid is probably what I would have come up with if they’d put me in charge of the combat revamp.

Also, trispec is gonna be cool. I’m going to be able to try a bunch of new (to me) playstyles on old characters. That’s exciting.

And the transmog changes are a godsend. As a player of many Blood Elves, I feel it is my duty to earn the “Fabulous” title as quickly as possible.

So, correct me if I’m wrong here, all the stuff in the pre-expansion patch is for everyone. regardless of whether they’ve pre-ordered? Or indeed whether they ever buy the expansion? Anyone at all can now use the new Transmog system or make a Gnome Hunter and all the rest of it?

Am I getting this right? Because on that basis I no longer need to buy Legion at all. I don’t even need to re-sub. I can do all the things i was interested in doing on a free sub-level 20 ticket…

New stuff always brings excitement, content starved or not. We are getting some new features that people want, like a wardrobe system that isn’t horrible. We are getting some exciting class updates. I feel like I will be validated in having three hunters at level cap at the end of Legion, since the three hunter specs might both require different play styles and might no longer be “the good one and the two you would never choose” any more. And we are bidding farewell to some unloved game mechanics, most notably the garrisons of solitude.

Seems like reason enough to be happy. And the old content is still there today, it just isn’t as lucrative as it was yesterday.

FYI you can’t exchange resources for bags of gold at the trader any more, either.

And in case anyone wasn’t aware, Jewelcrafting dailies now reward resources instead of 100-300g, and the Inscription merchant orders seem to sell for 1/10 of their previous price (certainly the normal one sells for 7g50s instead of 75g).

The only money-making route left in the garrison might be just selling herbs and ore to other players.